Google’s Controversial Vision of Tomorrow’s City

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Sidewalk Labs is a subsidiary company of Alphabet, founded in 2015 as a spinoff from Google, with the goal to improve city life for everyone by developing and incubating urban technologies to address issues like cost of living, efficient transportation, and energy usage.
They call this, building cities from the internet up.
Sidewalk looked throughout North America, Western Europe, and Australia to choose the first location of their first project and they ended up choosing Toronto, not the whole city, but the eastern waterfront which is largely barren and underutilized, consisting of more than 325 hectares of land.
A quick summary of Toronto, it is the Capital City of the Canadian Province of Ontario. With a population of 2.7 million people, it is the largest city in Canada and 4th largest city in North America.
Interestingly Toronto is the most diverse country in the world, almost half of its population are foreign-born with no single nationality or culture dominating the immigration population,
Here’s a map of the city’s diversity, each color representing a different ethnic group, the city contains Chinatown, Greektown, Koreatown, Little India, Little Italy, Little Jamaica, Little Portugal and a polish community.
Toronto’s diversity is a big part of Alphabet CEO Larry Page and Sidewalk Labs’ decision to pick the city, along with its booming tech sector and probably, more importantly, the 3 levels of government that support the project, called Sidewalk Toronto.
Sidewalk Toronto will be the test bed for Sidewalk Lab’s plan to make their vision of building a city from the internet up a reality.
The project will have 2 phases, phase 1 will start with a 5-hectare neighborhood on the waterfront called Quayside and will house around 5,000 residents and phase 2 will be expanding to the rest of the waterfront and house tens of thousands of residents.
Quayside will be the pilot program for Sidewalk’s Labs urban innovation platform and according to their vision, it will feel like no other neighborhood in the world.
And there are two main components in Sidewalk Labs platform, the physical layer, and digital layer.
The Physical Layer, it is broken into four parts.
The first is the Buildings, Sidewalk Labs’ urban innovation platform involves a system of flexible-use spaces that can evolve over time allowing the community a greater control of their environment. The buildings will be able to shift rapidly between purposes based on user needs.
Sidewalk approach to constructing the buildings will be like how cars are built, through a vertically integrated process spanning the full product lifecycle from design to delivery.
Buildings will be based on modern modular methods, additionally, they will create a comprehensive parts library and establish a construction system that has full interoperability.
In other words, all of the parts will work with one another, regardless of scale.
There will be a variety of designs, such as, flexible street-level shops, reconfigurable workspaces that share by multiple organizations and be resized on demand and apartments based on modular designs that can grow with the needs of families.
The building system centers on Loft Structures, that consists of a strong skeletal structure that can accommodate a variety of shapes, floor plans, and styles.
Within the Loft Structure, there are two concepts, the core Loft, and the Next-Gen Bazaar.

Music:
1st Track – Dream by Isben Producer
2nd Track – Down to Earth by Oliver Michael
Epilogue Track – Us to White by Brick Fields
Sources:
** https://sidewalktoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Sidewalk-Labs-Vision-Sections-of-RFP-Submission.pdf
**https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-sidewalk-labs-hadnt-foreseen-data-concerns-in-designing-high-tech/
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610249/a-smarter-smart-city/
**https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2017/10/17/google-firm-wins-competition-to-build-high-tech-quayside-neighbourhood-in-toronto.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto#Professional_sports
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2007/12/05/a_city_of_unmatched_diversity.html
** https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/01/when-a-tech-giant-plays-waterfront-developer/549590/
https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/16/alphabet-google-sidewalk-labs-toronto-quayside/
Sound Design Elements:
Construction http://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/
Construction https://freesound.org/people/ReWired/sounds/56699/
Traffic https://freesound.org/people/mzui/sounds/135095/

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